Inayat Bunglawala used his latest foray on CiF to call for “consistency” of liberal values so that the clerics of the Islamic far-right, Bilal Philips and Zakir Naik, may be allowed into the country.
We already have a sufficient number of laws on the statute books to deal with incitement to hatred and violence, and the fact is that both Bilal Philips and Zakir Naik have visited the UK on several occasions in the past – and their speaking tours have passed by without incident. Neither speaker has said anything that has got them in trouble with the law, so why not just uphold our existing laws rather than seek to pre-emptively ban them? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the exclusion order policy is yet another government PR gimmick designed to show that it is getting tough on those it regards as being extremists. And if the government believes that these speakers may still make some improper – though not unlawful – statements, then it should be regarded as a test of our commitment to free speech, especially if we regard its value as being universal.
Unfortunately for Bunglawala, what is clear is that he has no more respect or belief in the commitment to free speech than Richard Dawkins has for the Islamic tradition of the Mi’raj. This is the story of how the prophet Muhammed made a miraculous night journey on the back of a winged horse called Buraq, which took him from Mecca to Jerusalem and then to a lote tree at the farthest point in the Seventh Heaven, beyond which no angel is allowed to cross. The only difference is that, for Dawkins, this tradition is no more useful than a contemptible fairy tale; Bunglawala, on the other hand, has recognised that mouthing support for free speech and other liberal values can be used to gain political approval.
I had a question for Inayat, which I posted:
Inayat
Last October, the Guardian published an article by Delwar Hussain called ‘Prosecute Bangladesh’s war criminals’. The article discussed the alleged war crimes of Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin.
Within a few days, following a “legal complaint”, the Guardian was forced to remove all references to Mueen-Uddin from both the article from all comments below the line. The Guardian excised sections of the article and it now exists in its reduced form here.
Mueen-Uddin was simply taking full advantage of British defamation laws which are strongly weighted in favour of claimants and against freedom of expression.
Since you would now like us believe in your new-found belief in Freedom of Speech, do you think Mueen-Uddin was correct to impose the libel action on the Guardian?
And since you know the Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin personally, as one of your comrades from the Muslim Council of Britain etc, will you be advising him to withdraw it? All in the interest of free speech, of course.
Sadly, Inayat did not bother to respond with a reply. I am still waiting to hear back from him on his position on Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin’s libel action against the Guardian. I would like to know if his opinion on Mueen-Uddin’s libel action is consistent with his enthusiastic support for freedom of speech for Naik, Phillips and other advocates of terrorism and religious hate.
The comments left for Inayat are most interesting and well worth reading. Many of them have the measure of Bunglawala’s and the MCB’s motivation for supporting the right of the Islamic far-right to speak in the UK.
Here is one by ‘bubblecar’:
[W]e have to wonder why it’s important for diplomatically centre-right Islamists to demand that openly far-right Islamists be given more media prominence in Western countries. It seems fairly clear that the agenda here is to make “ordinary” conservative Islamists seem “reasonable” compared with the obvious nutters they want to grant more soapboxes here in the West, so that they can pretend to disagree with them.
I think that answers my question for me better than Inayat ever would.
27 Comments
Interesting. A response by Bungles in the comment thread “has been removed by a moderator”. What gives?
Qidniz
It isn’t the first time that Bungles’ comments have disappeared from his own threads. Having had some dealings with the inner workings of CiF, from what I can gather, Bungles sometimes “disappears” his own comments via a quick call to the CiF moderators. Presumably Bungles again bungled and wrote something he might have later regretted.
Hi Faisal,
1. My blog made clear that I support freedom of speech within the law – not without any limits. We quite rightly have laws that prevent someone libelling another person by making untrue and defamatory allegations. CM was perfectly within his rights to take libel action if he felt he was defamed in the Guardian. If you have a problem with that then take it up with parliament who set our laws.
2. As for the nitwit Abu Faris above: I have no hand in Cif moderation at all. Sometimes my comments are removed from Cif if I was responding to another person and quoted remarks that were made by that person which the moderators deemed broke Cif rules. So both the original remarks and my response quoting those remarks are then removed.
Btw, this is truly a crap website!
Hi Inayat
Thanks for responding. Your answer to my question confirms everything I thought about your flakey commitment to free speech. In other words – you’re only committed to liberal values as long as it protects your interests and the interests of your fellow right-wing Islamists.
“We quite rightly have laws that prevent someone libelling another person by making untrue and defamatory allegations. CM was perfectly within his rights to take libel action if he felt he was defamed in the Guardian.”
So no commitment to reforming Britain’s libel laws, I see, as long as they can be used to silence critics of you and your fellow Islamists.
What I’d like to know is, how do you know they were defamatory allegations made of Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin until a libel court makes that judgement? Quite clearly, the Guardian simply took down the article because it didn’t want to go to court and incur huge legal expenses as a result of the legal action that the litigious Mr Mueen-Uddin threatened to make. Nothing more can be inferred beyond that.
But your support for this act of censorship shows what a steaming pile of bullshit your Guardian article is, and not to mention how expedient your support for Zakir Naik and Bilal Philips.
Yep, I thought that might flush the Bungles from cover.
Down in Louisiana they catch worms for bait by grinding a metal rasp against a wooden stake driven into the ground. The vibrations drive the critters to the surface. Mentioning CiF moderation and the relationship between an above-the-line blogger and them usually gets the latter into a tizz and causes a reaction.
It’s nice to find some regularities in life – and Bungles can always be trusted to play his part.
Incidentally, Bungles – who is your woeful i-engage site? Still promoting the Muslim Brotherhood?
Quoth Bungles:
Yeah, right. Oddly the same does not seem to happen when other commentors quote previously deleted comments. You seem to be cursed.
I think you have really made it when an Islamist of Bungles’ intellectual and moral standing suggests your web site is crap.
Well done, Spittoon!
Quoth Bungles:
“Salma is a fantastic role model“????
Next up, Inayat snogs Gorgeous George live on Press TV?
http://inayatscorner.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/salam-yaqoob-on-question-time-tonight/
Bungles is off his meds again!
Nurse, the screens!
W]e have to wonder why it’s important for diplomatically centre-right Islamists to demand that openly far-right Islamists be given more media prominence in Western countries. It seems fairly clear that the agenda here is to make “ordinary” conservative Islamists seem “reasonable” compared with the obvious nutters they want to grant more soapboxes here in the West, so that they can pretend to disagree with them.
This is so like what’s going on here in Tower Hamlets right now. .. Maybe we can all agree that the cancelled Troxy convention was a bit nutty, a bit extreme, not representative, not at all like our good friends and comrades in the IFE.
You really have to read the comments on Inayat’s bullshit article to see how completely they see through his and Muhammed Amin’s pathetic charade.
An odd sort of balance:
We also have (quite rightly) laws that prevent someone from spreading hate-speech by making untrue and inflammatory allegations against whole other people, interest groups or religious believers. These laws include the option to bar people from entry to the country on the grounds that they have before demonstrated publicly such bigotry.
Surely Bungles would go along with this?
No.
Free speech is entirely a one-sided phenomenon for Bungles. Free speech means “standing up” for the right of bigots such as Bilal Philips to freely propagate his very own message of hatred aimed at Jews, gay people and non-Muslims:
So, only the media think Philips is a hate-preacher, not Bungles?
How very liberal of Mr Bungles.
http://inayatscorner.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/abu-ameenah-bilal-philips-banned-from-the-uk/
I agree, Faisal. An early comment on Bungles’ CiF piece is from one Plutonian, who comments very pithily:
How very true.
Unfortunately, there is no legal process in place to exclude hate-inciters like Bilal Philips and Zakir Naik from entering the country. For these guys to be barred entry, I’m told that the current Home Secretary has to intervene, and she had not done so as of last week.
So these people will be allowed in, in spite of promises made by the Tories.
Inayat and his band of Jamaat-e-Islami/Muslim Brotherhood entryists have won the battle. And genuine liberal values have been lost.
Abu Faris
“It isn’t the first time that Bungles’ comments have disappeared from his own threads.”
Given Spittoons propensity for deleting comments it doesnt like or removing the vowels as well as Harrys Place moderation policy on comments this is a typically hypocritical comment
We’ve only deleted or removed the vowels of your comments, marwan.
That’s because they are so unbelievably crude, nasty and depraved. Usually about enjoying the rape of Bangladeshi women by Pakistani soldiers or some nasty antisemitic slur..
And now you’re looking for sympathy. boohoo for you.
“Usually about enjoying the rape of by Pakistani soldiers of Bangladeshi women or some antisemitic slur about jewish people. “
Sounds like the kind of thing the MCB would approve of.
Oh look, the moderators at CiF seem to have removed Bungles’ previously deleted comment completely and without a trace.
Surely not? Nah, must be the elves, or sumfink.
“typically hypocritical”?
Coming from a racist, misogynist religious fruitcake like you, Marwan, I take that as a real compliment.
Many, many thanks.
Faisal
“That’s because they are so unbelievably crude, nasty and depraved. Usually about enjoying the rape of Bangladeshi women by Pakistani soldiers ”
No liar that was posted by you , in my name, something as blog owner it is easy for you to do. You really have absolutely no ethics do you Faisal ?
Nope you’re the one who’s lying, they were posted by you. And all the IPs can be traced back to your ISP. That’s why, in spite of the fact that you use dozens of false handles, I can identify you. The only thing I change in your posts, is changing your name to “marwan” so that readers can identify they come from, in spite of your best efforts to hide your identity.
You come here with your false piety, your holier than thou morality and your posts are the worse than anything that anyone has posted here. What an unbelievably nasty fucking piece of work you are.
Faisal
“What an unbelievbly nasty f*cking piece of work you are”
Yes you are. I didnt post the post about Bangladeshi women loving to be raped by Pakistani men (astagfirullah) You did in my name. And may Allah SWT’s curse be on the liar ! Ameen.
The very fact you added (Generic Pakistani Islamist), something I’d hardly write myself, in brackets after my name on some of my posts (then removed it) is evidence that you tamper with posts on here of those you disgree with and have no ethics.
Faisal: You have made a name for yourself trumping up the alleged crimes of Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, taking aim at so-called Bangladeshi Islamists who were roundly beaten by the supposedly secular and anti-Islamist Awami League. So, a few questions for you:
Do you support the ruling Awami League government?
It seems that you do:
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/2619
And your friend certainly gloated:
http://hurryupharry.org/2008/12/30/awami-league-sweeps-to-victory-in-bangladesh/
Do you support their own paramilitaries, the BCL? You can see their work, and their intimidation with government approval here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhyTbc06-do&feature=related
Do you think the ruling Awami League government is any better than the Jammat-e-Islami? So I suppose you support, in addition to their army of hoodlums, their tendency to be a bit, well, Iran-like, as they have with the recent shutting down of an opposition newspaper:
http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/06/bangladesh-shuts-down-pro-opposition-newspaper/
We didn’t get the headline post on this Faisal, why is that?
“The very fact you added (Generic Pakistani Islamist), something I’d hardly write myself, in brackets after my name on some of my posts (then removed it) is evidence that you tamper with posts on here of those you disgree with and have no ethics.”
I added “Generic Pakistani Islamist” to identify you. It’s an obvious descriptor – I also changed all your multiple pseudonyms to “marwan”. However, the body of your posts were never touched – no need to. You went through a phase of using particularly grotesque language, of which you now seem to be in a state of denial. And yes, I ran some of your posts through the devowelizer, which is a WordPress plugin, for the particularly nasty ones.
It is quite amazing, although not the least bit surprising, to see you put on the pious mullah-act to back your bullshitting. Nauzubillah!
It’s fooling no one, of course. Like I said,you can change your name but your static IPs are coming from your ISP, which are easily traceable.
And may Allah SWT’s curse be on bullshitters! Ameen, indeed.
Rambo
“Do you think the ruling Awami League government is any better than the Jammat-e-Islami? “
Do I think the Awami League government is better than a fascist, theocratic party derived from the the ideology of Mawdudi, and whose senior party members were instrumental in the genocide of 2 million Bengali muslims and hindus? The same party whose clerical fascist stalwarts now run the Muslim Council of Britain, the East London Mosque, the London Muslim Centre, YMO and the IFE right here in the UK?
I think that’s a pretty obvious choice, don’t you? I’d say any party operating in South Asia is better than the religious far-right Jamaat-e-Islam.
Can you tell us your reasons for supporting them?
(Off-topic, scnr)
devowelizer
Is that what they call the plugin? When I first saw the technique, it was called disemvoweling. (So, I would have expected a name like “disemvoweler”.)
Yes “disemvoweler” not “devowelizer”. It’s late.